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'Updating ESCD...' hanging *facepalm*

S

Syntho

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2022
Messages
83
Every time I turn around there's something else going wrong with a system of mine.

I took out a sound card from a W95 system and popped it into another. I booted the W95 system without the sound card and it said "Updating ESCD..." and that's where it hangs. I read that that has something to do with PnP cards. So I popped the ISA soundcard back in but it still tells me Updating ESCD and hangs there. I tried resetting the BIOS, removing the battery etc but it keeps telling me this every single time.

Here's the mobo manual: https://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Azza/manual/5is/5is.pdf

I can't get past this and I'm not sure what else to try.
 
Disable "PnP BIOS Auto-Config", once it boots then re-enable it.
 
Plasma said:
Disable "PnP BIOS Auto-Config", once it boots then re-enable it.
Click to expand...

This setting is in the PCI setup. I'm using only ISA cards but I disabled this option and rebooted to be met with the same behavior. I went back in and looked and the only thing this option seems to do is fool with some sort of IRQ numbers.
 
I got it fixed. I had only one card in the system, an ISA video card, and thinking it might be a video card issue I popped in another video card. Didn't help. I put the old one back in and posted this thread. Then after fooling with the settings as mentioned above I was out of ideas except for one: remove all cards and boot without video. I told myself out loud "that's a really dumb idea, but I'm gonna do it anyway". I took it out, started it up and heard a weird beep (to be expected), but soon I noticed the HD making more noise than usual, as if it were booting. I shut it down, put the video card back in, and now it works.

Taking out every card in the system and letting it boot on its own fixed it somehow.
 
ESCD is used by PCI card configuration as well. I have come across machines where the flash storage space somehow got corrupt (likely worn out from too many writes) and it would actually show "failed" every boot.
 
Here we go again. When I pop in a new video card it hangs at "Updating ESCD". I conquered the issue once before months ago by doing some weird combination of booting the system without any cards in it at all (even video) and resetting the machine.

So here I am again months later with the same issue. I put in a new card, got the ESCD thing, then somehow rebooting, taking out the battery, etc fixed it. But now I have the issue again. This time it isn't being caused by a card swap, but merely moving the card over to a new slot.

I'm at wit's end here.
 
It turns out the bios is corrupted. The bad news is that a fresh copy of it is nowhere to be found on the net. It's an Azza 5is v2.
 
Syntho said:
It turns out the bios is corrupted. The bad news is that a fresh copy of it is nowhere to be found on the net. It's an Azza 5is v2.
Click to expand...

It looks like a fairly common AT style Pentium motherboard of the time. You may try dumping the current BIOS and flashing a BIOS from a similar motherboard with the same chipset.

I've had to do this a few times when the original board BIOS was no longer available, or it was so broken that something else had to be used.
 
Thanks for the reply but i finally figured it out. It was a Turbo setting that was halting my PC. I unplugged the Turbo plug from the FP header and now all is fine.
 
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